Dead Island Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 9th, 2011

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Dead Island is an expansive, epic masterpiece of a zombie game. It's not perfect, but it's one heck of a gruesome, well-executed first outing for a brand new intellectual property from a relatively unknown studio. It may not be the most original story, but what zombie fiction really is? It's the characters and the smaller moments that separate good zombie fiction from bad. Dead Island has those in spades, but also great gameplay. If you like zombies, great action, and/or a very deep game with lots to explore, upgrade, and do, then Dead Island is definitely the game for you.

While killing zombies has its moments, Dead Island only features two types of missions that don't involve killing horde A at location B: fetch quests, and glorified fetch quests. And while the game tries to offer up a few new kinds of zombies to vary the gameplay, these overpowered and irritating enemies are better off left behind, unless you enjoy time spent chipping away at an oversized reserve of hit points. I don't feel it's my place to tell game developers how to do their job, but an open-world zombie game has far more potential than what Techland is putting on display. There's certainly a lot of fun to be had on Dead Island, but don't be surprised if tedium sets in once you've murdered a zombie in every way imaginable (estimated time: 20 hours).

Techland has aimed high with Dead Island, but ultimately fallen short of truly realizing a Borderlands-esque open-world undead killfest. The game lacks the sophistication of other zombie games such as Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, and has enough design gaffes to sink a battleship. But as long as you have a bit of patience and don't expect a true survival horror experience, you will have oodles of guilt-free fun mashing away at zombies on this twisted beach paradise.

There's much that's fresh and inventive about "Dead Island," but it feels like it was released with barely any play-testing. It's often exciting and occasionally terrifying but its deadly glitches too often kill the mood.

The trailer left a lot of gamers excited for Dead Island, even without them truly understanding what the game was all about. Misconception issues aside, Dead Island is an extremely fun game which will keep players busy for a long time. The captivating setting, huge assortment of weapons and great co-op implementation more than make up for any technical shortcomings. While its far from perfect, the developers over at Techland deserve a lot of props for creating one of the best games that Deep Silver has ever published.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to island.

Dead Island's low-budget charms are numerous, if you can look past some awkwardness and bugs (quests sometimes reset themselves, the save system is haphazard, and the voice acting is iffy). The best positioning statement we've heard is from MTV games blogger Russ Frushtick, who described the game as "Borderlands with zombies." If that sounds like your kind of thing, you should book your trip to the island of Banoi immediately.

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